


Somewhere Else

by orphan_account



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Is it genuine? Who knows, Isolation, Mental Health Issues, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24570832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Statement of Alna Peters, regarding a rented apartment she occupied in Dubai. Original statement given December 28th 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London....A statement read by S1 Jon.The people in this fic are not real, but the places very much are.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11





	Somewhere Else

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me if I should add any CWs! Mild horror at best.

Statement of Alna Peters, regarding a rented apartment she occupied in Dubai. Original statement given December 28th 2011\. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

It’s been a while since I left Dubai. I was born there, you know. And like thousands of other second-generation Indian expatriates, I grew up there. We were very much middle-class, so we lived in neighbourhoods full of other middle-class people. That was Karama when I was young, and Muhaisnah for a year before we left the city for good.

Karama was one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city. My parents had set up there in the eighties, and it was almost entirely expats who lived there, Indians and Filipinos. It had this—oh, it’s hard to describe. Culture? History? What do cities acquire when they age? London has so much of this—this _thingness,_ that it’s become background noise for everybody here. Dubai’s not like that. It wasn’t much more than a pearling village before the fifties, and it became increasingly obvious the further you went from the centre.

Muhaisnah was on the outskirts.

It was just sand and buildings out there. All the buildings looked somewhat identical in every direction, except we lived in the biggest one—and it was _ridiculously_ large. Absolutely massive. Five blocks of three floors each, with perhaps twenty flats on each floor. They weren’t small flats, either. The rooms were large, with big insulated windows. The doors were solid. The fittings were shiny. At the rent they were offering, it was a deal.

We obviously weren’t the only ones to feel that way. The company managing the building only rented to families. The building’s parking was full of cars and residents had extra vehicles out on the sand. At least a dozen children from that building went to the same school as my sister. It’s just funny, then, that I saw so few people while we lived there. My mother claimed she’d seen the people across the hallway move in, a North African family with three kids, but none of us ever saw any movers. Or any children.

Perhaps it was because the weather didn’t really encourage socialising. It could get quite hot there, think fifty degrees centigrade? And it was just easier to stay at home. The windows were good at keeping the heat out, and the HVAC was excellent. Stepping out was always a bit of a chore anyway, because the hallways weren’t air conditioned. I’d be a sweaty mess in minutes, and you heard the most frightful stories about heatstroke.

We couldn’t really invite anybody in, either, because those hallways were a complete maze. The signs were only sometimes correct, and we weren’t allowed to stick anything on the front doors. I mostly told flats apart by their welcome mats, myself. All the blocks looked the same from both sides, and every other hallway looked identical, so I’d sometimes find a flat with the right door number and the wrong mat. The only way around that was to find the lift, leave the building, and try again.

I remember being quite happy there, even if I did get lost from time to time. I don’t imagine my family felt differently, but we weren’t the sort who talked about emotions. My parents were planning our return to India at the time, so they probably saw any grievances they had with the place as temporary.

My own experience only took a turn for the sour towards the end of our stay. My mother and my sister had already left the country at the time. My father worked long hours—reasonable hours for someone in his position, perhaps, but they were still long. I’d wake up after he left and retreat to my room before he got home, and I’d occupy the hours in between by myself.

I must have spent hundreds of hours this way. The windows let in no sound and looked down on vacant parking lots under the building, so I kept the curtains drawn shut. There were no people in the hallways, even if I could occasionally smell frying coconut from someone’s kitchen.

I did have friends, of course, but they weren’t the sort to call my house, so I didn’t think much of that. Slightly more concerning was that I hadn’t spoken to my father in over a week, and that had been a phone call. I’d last seen him long before that. This made me uncomfortable, but only because I knew that I _ought_ to be uncomfortable. 

I  sat up for him to return from work one night, and he hadn’t returned by  one in the morning. 

I tried staying up all of next night in case I’d missed him coming home past one, but he never showed up. Where was he?  Trying to call him only resulted in a recorded voice telling me our phone plan had been cancelled. Would my father have done that?  We  _were_ supposed to leave the country in a month or so. That made sense, right?  At the time,  that was the explanation I’d come up with. It rung hollow but it was the best one I had.

It still never occurred to me that he might have been in danger, or that something  unusual might have taken place. No, I was convinced he was safe, if horribly overworked.  I knew he was eating responsibly, and that he talked to my mother every evening.  I just... didn’t know where he was, and I tried not to think about it. Luckily, I’m good at not thinking about things.

A mad impulse one morning made me grab some money and the keys and head out of the flat. There was a shopping complex within walking distance, and I suppose buying something was the plan. I just knew I had to do _something._ Talk to someone. Anyone. Was it because I knew isolation wasn’t a good thing, or because I actually felt uncomfortable? 

The AC in the lobby chilled the sweat on my neck so fast it made me shiver,  but there was nobody around to see . I could feel the cold coming off the tile through the soles of my shoes . It was so bright outside it almost hurt to look up through the glass doors at the end.  I’d always wondered why they’d left them untinted—wasn’t it a waste to cool a room like this and then let the sun in to warm it up again?

I could feel the air warm as I got closer to the glass. My palm was clammy when I raised it to push the door open, and it wasn’t entirely the heat to blame. I raised the other hand to shield my eyes from the sky.

Shock takes a few seconds to set in, and I managed to get a few steps in in that time, so I must have been a metre from the building when I felt the sun hit me.

I gasped, and my lungs were full of hot air.  The sand reflected the sun so brilliantly my eyes threatened to water. The sky found every bit of skin I hadn’t covered and pressed down with scalding fingers—my forearms, my face, the parts of my feet that weren’t covered by sandal straps, all burning. I could feel myself redden; some things even sweat couldn’t cool. I knew this. I still took another step forward.

That’s when I noticed the silence. Muhaisnah wasn’t busy enough to be noisy, and particularly not at this time, but there really was nothing at all. I looked around to confirm it, too,  though I had to squint so hard I could barely see . No people.  No cars, no buses. Not a single  thing moving, except for a weak breeze tugging at some sand on the road.  It was as hot as the draft from a hairdryer when it reached me.

I turned and looked up at the building. Not a single balcony had laundry hanging out to dry. There was dust everywhere: thick and undisturbed on the windows and rails, enough to turn the sky taupe. I couldn’t look at it for long before my eyes began to water in earnest. I staggered unseeing over to a vehicle parked on the sand nearby—for shade? Support? It didn’t matter. The air shimmering over the roof of the car should have been a clue. I yelped when my fingers made contact with the scalding metal, and it was a shock to hear anything after all the silence _._

My cry hadn’t echoed, but I looked anyway.  The surrounding buildings, all great squat things like the one I lived in,  loomed  featureless and silent.  It felt like something terrible had come through here and left me behind, and I didn’t know if I felt rejection or relief. 

I _did_ knew that walking in this heat would be dangerous without preparation, so I retreated to the lobby and its welcoming coolness. My legs immediately folded underneath me, but that brought me against the cold floor, and it was incredibly welcome. 

And if I breathed hard and coughed and cried a little, nobody was there to see it.

There weren’t any problems getting back home, though, and I spent the rest of the day curled up in bed. I didn’t understand what had happened – I still don’t, but I managed to convince myself it was a coincidence just so I could sleep. Midday wasn’t a particularly busy time for traffic. And surely nobody else would be out in this kind of heat. The stories you heard about heatstroke, really. It was dangerous.

I knew I was lying to myself. I’d been somewhere else for many days now, and I didn’t know how to get back. I didn’t know what would happen to me. I had visions of running out of food, of the water and the electricity being turned off, of my father leaving the country without me—so I did what I was good at. I didn’t think about it.

I escaped by fluke, I think. I heard a knock on my  room  door one night,  and I shot up in bed and hurried to open it. In hindsight I suppose I should have been more careful, but it was my father standing there, tired eyed, smiling. He passed me his mobile phone. I squinted at the screen, where I saw my sister scowling at me. I still remember what she said, the first words I’d properly heard after so long. “God, you look  half  dead.” 

I laughed, and then I coughed myself to tears. 

She had wanted my help with  _college applications_ , something so ordinary I was half convinced she’d used it as code. A euphemism.  My father suggested I might get better reception in the living room, so I followed him there. I think that’s when I left that somewhere else.  Things were normal after that, as normal as they get around here, and I didn’t miss it when we left.

Statement ends.

The building Ms Peters refers to appears to be called just R-435, and it _appears_ to be, for all intents and purposes, an entirely normal residential building. Further details regarding its history were difficult to obtain... however, Sasha estimates the building could not have been older than five years when Ms Peters moved in. The contact details provided were for her sister Susan Peters in Newbury, who revealed that her sister had been on psychiatric medication for five years and may have been undiagnosed at the time these events took place. (Colour me surprised.) She did confirm, however, that she had not spoken to her sister for many weeks during this period. Further inquiries were not entertained, but I do not think they will be necessary.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based in large part on my actual experience living in the very real and unsettling R-435, which is pretty much exactly as I've described here--except you figure out how to navigate the place fairly quickly after moving in! And I did see the folks across the hallway one (1) time.


End file.
